Find and Recruit Local Talent to Drive and Support Scale

How can you effectively engage and develop local talent to support and drive impact at scale?

The availability of “local talent” — generally discussed as talent that is local to the market in which the work occurs — is cited as a challenge for social enterprises throughout all stages. The challenge exists for enterprises with international operations and also for enterprises operating locally within one country but expanding into new regions.

In Rippleworks’ 2016 survey, “The Human Capital Crisis: How Social Enterprises Can Find the Talent to Scale,” one in five social entrepreneurs cited the limited supply of local talent as their top hiring challenge (second only to not having sufficient funding to attract top talent and compete with more established employers). This perception is generally based on challenges in matching needed skill sets with existing skill sets of the local talent market, the stiff competition for highly skilled local talent (especially with deep-pocketed multinational corporations), and the challenge for ventures that are not local to an area in navigating recruitment and hiring in an unfamiliar setting.

While some social enterprises seek to engage local talent simply as a way to staff the work, many others see engaging local talent as much more integral to their ability to achieve impact at scale. Local talent bring a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the local ecosystem, culture, and appropriate solutions; may have existing relationships to leverage; have inherent credibility due to ‘insider status;’ and can help drive the sustainability of a solution. While engaging local talent is an important factor to address throughout an enterprise’s lifecycle, the challenges during scale are often a bit different. During scale, enterprises who have been engaging local talent need to consider how to include this talent pool in the organization’s leadership pipeline (i.e., transitioning local staff to leadership roles), expand methods of recruitment and hiring to increase local footprints, and formalize commitment to talent development.

Please note: While this section speaks primarily to the recruitment and development of local talent, the extent to which an organization’s culture empowers this talent’s voice and provides an inclusive environment is inextricably linked. Engaging local talent can be connected to an organization’s effort to drive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and thus we recommend also reading the DEI strategy article for this perspective.

Advice from the field includes:

1. Don’t be limited in your thinking of who is right for the job.

A skill set mismatch and competition for skilled talent are often cited as key challenges in finding local talent. But, as journalist Donna Bryson points out in a 2013 Stanford Social Innovation Review article, the obstacles also include “shaking off entrenched assumptions and institutional cultures.” Social enterprise Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator works to tackle these assumptions and cultures around unemployed youth in particular, as it fundamentally believes that “talent takes many shapes, and people have the potential to do things they haven’t necessarily been trained for or done before.” To connect the significant population of unemployed youth with entry-level jobs, Harambee helps employers make shifts in their assumptions and operations to effectively engage these high-potential youth. These shifts, as listed below, are also relevant to most any enterprise seeking entry-level talent in an emerging market.

1. Create hiring processes to judge a young person’s capability, rather than considering only their prior work experience and educational qualifications;
2. Adopt new tools for hiring that can judge future potential to do the job (such as assessments to measure learning potential), instead of relying solely on school-based knowledge (i.e., numeracy and literacy tests that judge only the quality of previous education);
3. Take innovative approaches to create more inclusive workplaces and break down barriers to retention (like providing an advance on first paycheck so a young person who has no income can afford transport for the first month of work until the first paycheck); and
4. Ultimately, create the evidence base to confirm that there is value in hiring youth with no prior work experience and thereby widening the available talent pool.

Beyond entry level positions, scale is also a time when new leadership positions are established and when organizations need to double-down on building a leadership pipeline. But many organizations find that even if they have successfully hired local talent for more junior positions, their leadership is still over-represented with ex-patriates. Paul Knox Clarke of the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP) points out that many aid and development organizations also make assumptions about the profile for leadership positions that disadvantage host country nationals. “If you have the white man’s idea of leadership, it’s not surprising that you keep getting white, male leaders,” he says. “Other cultures might bring more collaborative ideas.”

Photo courtesy of One Acre Fund

Case in Point: Prioritizing Local Talent at All Levels
One Acre Fund, which supplies smallholder farmers with the capital and support needed to overcome poverty and hunger, recognizes that local talent brings deep local knowledge, long-term commitment to the farmers they serve, and an intrinsic understanding of appropriate agricultural solutions for the context and client base. At the time of writing, One Acre Fund employed more than 4,000 full-time field staff (roughly 80 percent of the organization’s total staff), hired directly from the rural communities that they serve. It recognizes, however, that relying on its U.S. networks for hiring in its startup days has led to an overrepresentation of international staff in leadership roles at the organization. Today, it is a top priority of the organization to hire and develop “talented African leaders who will guide the next phase of our organizational growth” and in 2018, 26 of 30 hires for management positions in Africa were African nationals. This journey has required a dual-focus on different hiring practices alongside professional development for existing local talent.

2. Invest in developing local talent to build leadership pipeline and drive scale.

CAMFED and Harambee have both built their models to create and execute solutions driven by those communities who will ultimately benefit. CAMFED knows that the most successful and sustainable approaches to improve girls’ educational opportunities come from the communities themselves, so it prioritizes hiring alumni of the program (who are from those communities) to paid staff positions and developing them as future leaders. CAMFED sees its alumni as the individuals who are best-positioned for roles that shape the culture and leadership of the organization. As of early 2019, nearly 40 percent of CAMFED staff are former beneficiaries, and CAMFED’s offices in Africa are staffed entirely by nationals of those countries. Harambee has a similar vision and, given its core mission of solving youth unemployment, it acts as a case in point for hiring and developing that target population. The organization maintains that talent can take many shapes and that people have the potential to do things for which they have not necessarily been trained — and thus they operate a robust talent management and development strategy.

Proximity Designs (PD), based in Myanmar, faced a major challenge in identifying local talent for its program, given the political and social reality of the country for many years which resulted in a population that was largely educated through rote-learning in schools that suffered under decades of military rule. To effectively engage local talent, the founders knew training would be critical. They learned in an initial effort that bringing people together in the capital for one week of training a year on a variety of topics was insufficient; staff did not have enough time to learn, retain, or apply the skills they would need to continue their leadership development. PD then launched a “Learning Hub” model in 2017 that is “experiential, collaborative, and integrated into the leader’s daily work challenges and long- term career goals.” The training periods are much longer (four months instead of one week), primarily outside the classroom, and in-person classroom experiences are located closer to the workers. For more on talent development, see “Evolve Strategies to Train Talent as you Scale.”

3. Recruit and hire local talent more efficiently.

If your organization has limited presence in the country or region in which you are recruiting, your HR department is unlikely to be well-versed in that country’s local regulations or best methods of outreach. Our interviewees shared three strategies they have used to overcome such barriers as they scale and have more demand for local talent:

1. Use local recruiting firms (who understand local context and have existing networks): When first building out its local staff in Tanzania, Sproxil conducted online research to identify the local search firms, sought out reviews, and interviewed the finalist firms to ensure they understood Sproxil’s unique hiring needs and had the necessary skills and networks to successfully complete the searches. Root Capital recognized that its own US- based HR team was limited in its ability to comprehensively recruit (and do initial screening) for hires in Kenya, so it engaged Shortlist, an employment agency based in Kenya, to provide those services.
2. Hire Professional Employment Organizations (PEOs, outsourcing firms which act as employer of record): Root Capital is not registered as a formal entity in some of countries where it works, so to contend with regulatory issues Root Capital engages staff through PEOs. Other organizations engage local HR professionals or lawyers to help them understand regulations, taxation, and hiring laws in new countries of work.
3. Leverage existing local talent to identify and attract others: Once you are able to grow local teams, you can use them as culture carriers and as sources of referrals. VisionSpring established its first in-house HR department in India (where its presence was growing rapidly) to better leverage local knowledge and networks in hiring. In addition, the organization created a six-hour recruiting and interviewing training for all staff involved in hiring new team members to ensure consistency of process and consistency with core values and to enable staff members to be more purposeful in how they attract and invite talent into the organization.

Of Note: Standards in Setting Salaries
Setting salaries for local staff within a global organization can create tension and discomfort. Sproxil chose not to have global standards for equivalent roles but instead benchmarked against local standards and ensured benefits and salaries aligned with local norms. The key factor was setting salary and benefits at a level that was competitive with comparable positions (e.g., within other social enterprises or within other industries recruiting similar skillsets). To help determine norms, social enterprises can research other local job postings, benchmark with contacts working in other local industries, and utilize tools such as the Fair Wage Guide or InsideNGO by Humentum. Thinking creatively about incentives and benefits outside of salary can also be effective to compete for local talent; see the Leverage Non-Salary Incentives strategy article for more.

4. Make a commitment to hiring locally, and communicate that to your stakeholders.

As an organization founded in the U.S. but working internationally, VisionSpring made the intentional decision not to hire expats to its country teams. This decision meant it sometimes took the organization longer to grow that local talent or find the right person, but VisionSpring CEO Gudwin said it was definitely the right decision for the organization. Similarly, One Acre Fund committed to hire locally as it expanded, and learned that it needed to put time into developing those leaders to rise within the organization so as not to relegate local talent to entry level positions. Root Capital is also committed to staffing its regional offices with local talent; it recognizes that while it may take additional time, deep knowledge of the local business environment and regulations is key to execution. Committing to hiring only local talent for certain positions and/or certain office locations can push a venture to make the significant effort even when it feels external pressure to hire more quickly. Communicating this commitment to stakeholders, therefore, is also key.

71 percent of survey respondents reported that over half of their staff are from or have deep on- the-ground experience with the communities they serve.

“Waiting to find the right person is less costly than taking on the wrong person, even though [the organization] has investors to please and deadlines to meet.” — Ned Tozun, Co-founder D.Light, in SSIR

Do’s and Don’ts of Finding and Recruiting Local Talent

Read next: Continue to Invest in and Prioritize Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Evolve Strategies to Train Talent as You Scale, or return to see all articles in People Power.

This article was written by Erin Worsham, Kimberly Langsam, and Ellen Martin, and released in July 2019.